Thursday, April 15, 2004

"A few miles to the south, at 4:30 a.m., Capt. John Combs, the convoy commander, radioed back, "This is a known ambush point." It was a message he repeated frequently on the first part of the journey.

Near dawn, he radioed back with another worrisome message: The bridge ahead had been hit with explosives. "We'll have to find another route, maybe through Baghdad," Combs said. An hour later he called to report that the convoy had adopted Plan C: "The bridge at the secondary route is untenable, so we're going with a new route."

(just in case you thought our near-obsessive focus on Iraq was weakening)